Regular “progressive download” videos are downloaded to the viewer’s browser first, which is why using plugins like Video Downloader will let you download the video you’re watching.

But using S3MediaVault, you can create true-streaming videos that cannot be downloaded, because they’re both secure, as well as streamed in segments to the viewer’s browser. Which means plugins like Video Downloader won’t be able to find a single mp4 file to download.

You’ll have to use both S3 and CloudFront together to create this streaming video, and S3MediaVault.com can help you do just that..

S3MediaVault uses Amazon AWS MediaConvert service to create the streaming version of your mp4 and then delivers that to your viewer, and makes it really easy and manage everything from within WordPress without having to log in to AWS or know any of the technical stuff behind creating a streaming video.

S3MediaVault.com can create an audio player for your mp3 and wav files stored in your Amazon S3 account.

You can create individual audio players for individual audio files, and publish multiple individual S3 audio players on a single page.

Or if you wish to combine a bunch of audio files into a playlist, S3MediaVault also has an Audio Playlist player, where the group of audio files will appear as a playlist. And if they hit play on the first one, then the player will continue playing through the entire playlist, one after the other, until it reaches the end of the player.

Prettiest Audio Player on the Planet

Large “Play” button

Customizable Title for the audio. If you don’t provide it, it will display file name.

“Download” icon that provides a direct link to the audio file, and upon being clicked, will give user option to either “Save” the file or “Open” it. Very similar to any other file you download from the web.

Smart-Speed: Clicking on it allows the playback to play at speeds of 1x, 1.5x and 2x. And the smart-speed feature speeds up the audio by cutting out the dead-air, gaps and silences, and will make the overall audio sound faster and won’t make the person speaking sound like a chipmunk 🙂

Starting timestamp always shows how much time has elapsed since the audio started playing.

Nice and big “scrubber” allows the listener to easily fast-forward or rewind the audio according to their convenience.

Fully customizable Player color (player background). Comes with a easy-to-use Color Picker with a full color palette that lets you pick any color of your choice for the player background. You can also enter Hexadecimal codes (like “#0faacc”) if you already know what color you wish to use.

Has a border that also has a color picker and you can choose any color for the border as well.

Ending timestamp always shows how much time is left in the audio being played.

Fully customizable Audio Artwork that you can configure using any Image URL hosted anywhere online – including, of course, on your own WordPress site in your Media Library.

Before I launched my show SubscribeMe.fm in 2015, I was terrified of my Indian accent for a long time and probably wasted about a year overthinking it. And this was in-spite of having written books and recorded tons of sales and documentation and how-to videos over the previous 16 years. I was practically fearless when it came to everything else – including speaking on stage, dancing at a party, acting in a play (or even in TV shows back in India), being loud and demonstrative at a basketball game, etc.

But somehow, when I wanted to start a podcast, the intimate nature of me being in someone’s ears where they listened to me closely, the way I was listening to all of my favorite shows, terrified me because of what I thought of my accent.

One day, I had a client on a call – he was a podcaster and online radio guy – and he said he loves my show, that he loved my accent (when I sheepishly asked him about it) and that it adds a certain level of credibility to the stuff I talk about (digital marketing, WordPress, technical stuff, etc). And he added that he loved the authenticity of me not trying to fake anything.

I’m not claiming to be some kind of a big-shot or some major expert in voice training, but from having created about 200 podcast episodes on my 2 podcasts – SubscribeMe.fm and CutToTheChase.fm – and probably over a few hundred sales-, how-to and content marketing videos, here are some of my biggest tips for recording a podcast (and even to videos):

Made for Amazon S3 & CloudFront: It can securely deliver files via both Amazon S3 and CloudFront

CloudFront Integration: Blazing-fast media loading speeds for your members. Up to 45% faster loading speeds for videos and audio compared to using just S3 alone.

“True Streaming” Videos: Impossible-to-download, Secure Video Streaming for your most important videos that you may not want even your paying members to be able to download.

HLS Video Streaming support: “HTTP Live Streaming”, aka HLS, is a media streaming protocol for delivering visual and audio media online. It was created by Apple in 2009. In v11, S3MediaVault.com currently supports HLS Video Streaming.

Practically “Impossible” Download: Using Amazon’s MediaConvert API’s and HLS Streaming, your MP4 video is chopped up into short, 10 second chunks, and then delivered online in chunks to the viewer. And the MP4 video becomes a flowing stream with the extension M3U8. And because the video is never downloaded to the browser, but streamed in real-time, it is really hard to download it to your computer, and you can’t do it even using browser extensions like VideoDownloader, for eg. Only way to download the video is if you create a separate download link, because you want your members to download the video. Or they would have to use a screen-capture tool. So basically, it’s practically impossible to download, unless you want them to.You can also use the Standard S3MediaVault protection of your videos (“progressive downloads”). You don’t have to necessarily use True Streaming.

Works on ALL devices: iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Mac and every Operating System ever created!

Mobile-Responsive Video & Audio player will look- and work great on devices of all shapes and sizes

HTML5 Video Player – No Flash RequiredHTML5 Audio Player – No Flash Required

Video Playlist: Bundle any number of Amazon S3 files or public mp4 links to create a combined Video Playlist Player.

Audio Playlist: Bundle any number of Amazon S3 files or public mp3 links to create a combined Feed Player – aka Audio Playlist Player.

Time-Delay Buttons & HTML Content: You can now take a pre-created button or HTML content (like text, images, etc), set it to be initially hidden, and then make it appear below the video at a specific time (you can configure how many seconds into the video it should appear).

Transcriptions: S3MediaVault now integrates with Amazon Transcribe, which is one of the world’s leading Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. It allows you to analyze audio files stored in Amazon S3 and have the service return a text file of the transcribed speech.

1-Click Transcriptions: In the Media Manager page, S3MV will show you the list of all files in your S3 bucket. Click a link and get a transcription in minutes.

S3 Media Manager: Manage all S3 files from within the plugin. Never have to log in to S3 (other than one time during setup to get the Security Keys).

Full S3 Browser: Browse and Choose S3 files to use with the shortcodes, with just one click.

Instant Playlists: Just select the “Playlist” option, leave file name blank, and all Videos or Audio in that bucket (or sub-folder) will automatically be turned into an Instant playlist. Choose “Audio Playlist”, leave file name field blank, then all (and only) audio files in the bucket (or sub-folder) will be used to create an Instant Audio Playlist. Select “Video Playlist”, leave file name field blank, then all (and only) the video files in that bucket (or sub-folder) will be used to create an Instant Video Playlist.

Using S3 is having one centralized location where your files are stored, and regardless of where your website visitor is located, their web browser has to fetch the Audio, video, PDF or other media, only from that centralized location.

But adding CloudFront means, every file gets fetched from a datacenter closest to the visitor’s region.

So Amazon CloudFront is an additional layer that sits on top of your Amazon S3 bucket, and speeds up the delivery of the media in your S3 bucket. Think of it as adding “Turbo Boost” to your S3 files.

The image on the left above, shows that your Amazon S3 bucket is a single location stored in the cloud, and when visitors to your website from all over the world try to access a video, audio, pdf or other media stored in that S3 bucket, they are still served those files from that one central location. Which means, the farther they are geographically from your S3 bucket, the longer (even if it’s just milliseconds longer) it will take to serve them the file.

But CloudFront has various “edge locations” (those little clouds you see in the image on the right) spread globally. So when a US visitor tries to access, say, a video in your online course, if it’s the first time, then the “edge location” (cloud) closest to that person, will copy that file from your S3 bucket to the local cloud. And from that point onwards, every US person who tries to access that video, will be served that video from the local cloud, and not from the S3 bucket. And because Amazon has these edge locations all over the world, your visitors from all over the world will see that your videos, audio and PDF start loading super-fast, because it’s loading from a local cloud that’s closest to them.